


ten times what i am

by gigi_originally



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV), Peter Pan & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Canon, Experimental Style, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-17
Updated: 2014-02-17
Packaged: 2018-01-12 20:25:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1198617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gigi_originally/pseuds/gigi_originally
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a crown buried beneath the Thinking Tree, a crown of flowers forged for the girl who should have been Queen, and who will never know of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ten times what i am

**Author's Note:**

  * For [naessas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/naessas/gifts).



> Written for the **Rad Neverlanders Sexy Cupid Valentine Fic Exchange.**
> 
> For **Yasmin** , because the universe has decreed via random name generator that all my words are belong to her.
> 
> _Happy Valentine’s Day, Jeeves. I do love you much. ~ Wooster_

**Crownless again shall be the queen**  
 **Trophy on her grave still remains unseen**  
 **A boat on the river confessing the sins**  
 **The Riddler revealing the deep hidden things [[x](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5t8MbnWGcWc&feature=kp)]**

There are no kings in Neverland.   

A secret?  
This has not always been Peter Pan's refrain.  There was a time, long before Killian Jones arrived on the island, before the skies went dark, when Peter Pan claimed the title with relish.

And another? You’re greedy. Very well.  
There was a time, in between these two very different points in history, when he wanted a queen.  

Who was she?    
Oh, I’m sure you’ve heard of her. Her name was Wendy. Wendy Darling.

I have another secret for you:  
She’s still on the island; hidden away like a prisoner, like buried treasure.

No, no; don’t get confused.    
Peter Pan cannot love. It is the riddle of his being, to be forever adored yet never love another. He hoards love like dragons hoard gold. He does not give any of what he has received away.

But, once upon a time, he was willing to share.    
Would you like to hear that story?

#

Wendy Darling arrives in Neverland somewhere in the middle of the story. She is whisked off the windowsill of her London home and flown through the night sky until the green leaves of the Neverwood blanket the land beneath her. She is all excitement and eagerness in the Shadow’s grasp.  

Then, like all stories that begin too happily, there comes trouble.  

She is shot from the sky by the Lost Boys, arrows of all shapes and sizes sent hurtling in her direction for no other reason than to cause mischief. These are not nice boys, they are as lost to their manners and delicacies as they are lost to their parents.  

Wendy falls, back first, toward the hard Neverland earth.  

It is the boy king who recognizes the falling bundle of shrieking whiteness for what it is. He shoots into the air -- yes, he still had his magic then, enough to fly where and when he wanted -- and catches her in his arms. He holds her, from then and ever after, like a lover.

#

Peter Pan knows everything that happens on his island. This is a truth universally acknowledged. He is in tune with all its parts and most especially with its shadow.  

Oh yes, they call the Shadow his. It is not quite his exactly. Peter is Neverland is Pan. The Shadow they call his is not the Shadow torn from his own body but rather, it is the darkest parts of him; the parts that cannot be contained in the body of boy.  

Peter Pan, as he is, is both boy and man. Older than the oldest of men yet younger than every man to have ever lived. He feels both as man and boy but to exist on an island without time, he cannot grow. He cannot change. So his shadow is where he sends the pieces of him that he cannot fathom, cannot handle. The adult parts of himself.

The Shadow hides the deepest, darkest parts of his heart; the desires he cannot control or express. Still, the Pan knows them all intimately.  

So yes, why talk about the Shadow? Because Pan knows everything the Shadow does both on and off Neverland. He can find it wherever it may wonder, can feel all it feels, will know all it knows. But he cannot _control_ it. It is another part of his will given form and it is known, to those who truly know the Pan, that he will fight his own Shadow for days and days. They will disagree and the island will rumble and quake with the force of their arguments.

In one thing, though, the Shadow wins completely.

Ah, you're smart. Of course it is her: Wendy Darling.

The Shadow finds Wendy Moira Angela Darling telling stories of a boy she believes she imagined in her dreams in a cozy nursery in London. It does not want to want to take her back. It knows, as Peter does, that this girl is not a thing made for Neverland. Girls never are.

Oh, Tiger Lily? Red-Handed Jill? They are always the same girl, always the one with a different face in a new game. Every girl on the island is Wendy, just as every boy is Peter. All the Lost Boys are part of Peter; extensions of his rule and every girl -- every girl is an extension of his queen. But that is a different part of the tale that does not matter now.

Hush, I will tell you that one some other time.    
You wanted to know of the uncrowned queen.

#

When the Shadow returns to Wendy's window a second night, Pan takes notice. He listens intently because his heart -- the hidden thing buried under an hourglass inside a rock shaped like a skull -- thumps at her voice. He had not felt in so long the sensation brings him to his knees in the middle of the forest. He claws at the earth as the fluttering in his chest grows and grows to bursting but never bursts.  

He knows when she first notices the Shadow lurking at the edge of her window. Knows every conversation she has with it. He knows, more than anything else, how much the Shadow craves this girl's presence in Neverland.  

One night, the Shadow comes back. It returns to Neverland and _tells_ him that the girl will come.

They fight for three days.

In the end, the Shadow wields its deadliest weapon against its master and triumphs. It is but a single string of words but it is enough to win its way:

"I am not the one who loves her; an island cannot love."

The next night, her window is barred and a new boy sleeps within. A volcano erupts on the far end of the island and the Black Castle falls to ruin.

The Shadow knows the other boy but does not care. Peter cares because the other boy is part of his game.  

In the end, the Shadow remains in the darkness of the Darling garden and waits until the night the girl looks out, searching for adventure that she will never find anywhere but where the Shadow wants to take her.

#

In Neverland, Wendy arrives to morning sunlight. Back then, there was still sunlight. The Pan had not yet drowned the stars or fattened the clouds with his rage.

As Peter's young arms close around Wendy's small frame, the two parts of Neverland unite for the first time in more years than humanity can count. The boy becomes immediately as enraptured by her as all the parts of him that is man have been in the chill London nights.  

In the face of such a wonder, the sun burns with the light that hurts the eyes, every plant blooms, all the tides are high, the mermaids frolic without malice, and the fairies (Neverland's true fairies) dance to illuminate all the shaded parts of the forests. The flow of sand in Skull Rock's hour glass _stops_.

Peter Pan kisses her then and there, in mid-air with no introduction, and she is _his_.  

She gives him her heart and her hidden kiss all at once, innately recognizing that this boy is the Shadow's owner. He never speaks but she knows his voice like her own, hears it in her head, recognizes the face from her dreams and the intensity of his eyes from her most secret fantasies.

He never says it but she breathes his name like a prayer when they part.

"Bird," he calls her, "you cannot stay here."

This time, when he sends her back, the Shadow is silent and heavy and understanding.

#

Of course there is more. She is on the island, is she not? Treasure guarded and revered in equal measure.  

Oh no, he does not send for her. He wants to. He thinks of it often, imagines it more than anything else. He conjures her face in the stars on nights when he sleeps in the trees far away from his boys.

She has changed him, the Shadow and the island all in the brief moment she was there. She never even set foot on the soil. As such, the Soil whines at him for the denial. The Sky laughs at the mournful noise and the Winds sigh her name like a mantra.

Peter Pan cannot love.  
But whatever this was came disturbingly close to it.

#

She calls the Shadow to her window one night. It goes, like a dog to its owner, and Peter watches half-insulted, half-rapturous.

Oh yes, it still does. She breathes and it listens for her slightest command. The Shadow is hers, even if Peter Pan is not.

She says to it that she wants her brother back, that other boy Peter wanted for his game. That is all it takes. She is brought back to the island and not allowed off.

Yes, she does get the boy freed. She gets him sent off to a world where he can have a happy ending. Does he? I don't know. His story isn't quite finished yet.

Yes, yes, you're very right. There is always a price with Peter.  
Hers?  
Can you not guess?  
She trades Peter his own happy ending for Baelfire's.

#

Do you want to know another secret?  
Peter Pan's heart is not the only thing buried in the soil of Neverland.

There are bones aplenty but those rot and decay and give birth to inert pixie wood trees.  
There is treasure that bleeds into the earth around it, metallic and tangy and useless.

Pan's heart gives the island _eternity._  
Wendy Darling's flower crown gives it _life_.

#

The crown? Yes, there's a tale to that.

Once upon a time, a boy fell in love with girl. The boy thought he could not love. We still say he cannot love because he cannot do it _again_.

The boy's heart is an island and he tried to offer it to the girl in the shape of a crown. She is queen, of his island and of his heart.

But he is not a nice boy. He is as lost the boys he takes, tenderness and caring lost to him for all eternity. All he knows is meanness and knives. The softness it takes to woo a woman has been pushed away; invested in a Shadow that cannot rejoin him.

She sewed it back on once, in that brief moment where her breath was thread, her lips the needle and her kiss the thimble.

He tries his hardest to win the girl. He gives her a throne built into a tree. He shapes it like a home but it is a seat of power. Even he, king and ruler, bows to her in that space. He looms, wearing his authority like a cape too heavy, but in that space he is uneasy. He is very much part of what he has given her dominion over and it smarts when she wields that power against him.

So he tries again. He gives her whole parts of the island in the guise of tours. Shows her all the hidden parts of himself, the good and the bad. He introduced her to his vengeance in the mermaids, his despair in the Black Castle, his bloodlust in the Dreamshade. But he also shows her his wonder in the Fairies, his belief in the Pixie Dust, and his love in Stars.

She takes it all in and gives him nothing back.

So he tries one last thing.

Yes, the crown.

He uses the last of his magic, that magic that had been fading moment by moment without his care as he tried for Wendy, to make her a crown. He believes every flower into being, each one an honest expression of his feeling, of his absolute certainty that she is the one meant to rule beside him.

She never sees it.

#

Why? No one knows why.

There is a tale, old among those who remember -- which is saying something on an island without time -- that there was a day when the skies darkened permanently. It was the day the fairies died, the day the stars drowned, the day Peter uprooted his Thinking Tree.

No, what can one say of the words exchanged between lovers? For that is what they are, Peter and Wendy, lovers, star-crossed and star-cursed.  

All anyone knows is that there came a day when Neverland lost its sun, its stars and its king because he failed to gain a queen.

There are no kings in Neverland because there is no queen to match.

#

Would you like to know a secret, dear listener?

There is a crown buried beneath the Thinking Tree, a crown of flowers forged for the girl who should have been Queen. It is made of the last of Peter Pan's magic and it is the last thing holding the island together.

Peter Pan's heart beat its last long ago. The sand that runs in the Skull Rock is just sand measuring time now and that time is running out. It is the crown, the magic in the flowers and that last undying bit of Peter's belief, that fuels the island.

Neverland runs on the dying embers of Peter Pan's happy ending and the unshakable strength of true love.

And the queen? She knows the story of the island, knows its inevitable fate as well as her own. But she who will never know of the crown.

That secret will go with the not-king to his grave. His not-queen will still mourn him, somewhere.

**END**  


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